Skip to content
40%
South China Morning Post: “Russia has lost up to 40 percent of the units it sent into Ukraine when Moscow invaded its neighbour in February, the Ukrainian military’s general staff said on Wednesday.“
“The troops were either completely destroyed or have lost their combat capabilities, according to the daily bulletin, which did not give concrete numbers. The information could not be verified independently.”
“The advent of tactical nuclear weapons — a term generally applied to lower-yield devices designed for battlefield use, which can have a fraction of the strength of the Hiroshima bomb — reduced their lethality, limiting the extent of absolute destruction and deadly radiation fields. That’s also made their use less unthinkable, raising the specter that the Russians could opt to use a smaller device without leveling an entire city. Detonate a one kiloton weapon on one side of Kyiv’s Zhuliany airport, for instance, and Russian President Vladimir Putin sends a next-level message with a fireball, shock waves and deadly radiation. But the blast radius wouldn’t reach the end of the runway.”
39%
A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll finds President Biden’s approval rating for his handling of Russia and Ukraine has risen 5 percentage points since the start of the war in Eastern Europe more than two weeks ago — including a 12-point gain among self-described independent voters.
“Chinese leaders should be made to understand that this is a defining moment for their country and its relationship with the US… In short, the US should make clear that the strategic costs for China of its alignment with Russia will far outweigh any benefits.”
“I think that no later than in May, early May, we should have a peace agreement, maybe much earlier, we will see, I am talking about the latest possible dates.”
— A top adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zylensky said the war is likely to be over by early May when Russia runs out of resources to attack its neighbor, Reuters reports.
~4,000
“U.S. intelligence agencies estimate that between 2,000 and 4,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the two-week long invasion of Ukraine — possibly more than the number of Americans killed in the 20-year war in Afghanistan,” NBC News reports.
“The Chinese government is scrubbing the country’s internet of sympathetic or accurate coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and systematically amplifying pro-Putin talking points. … China’s wide use of its propaganda and censorship muscle helps insulate Beijing from a domestic backlash against its support for Putin— and leaves its citizens with an airbrushed, false version of events, similar to what’s seen in Putin’s state-controlled Russia.”
“It is a deep, seething bitterness for President Vladimir V. Putin, his military and his government. But Ukrainians are not giving a pass to ordinary Russians, either, calling them complicit through years of political passivity. The hatred is vented by mothers in bomb shelters, by volunteers preparing to fight on the front lines, by intellectuals and by artists. … The emotion is so powerful it could not be assuaged even by an Orthodox religious holiday on Sunday intended to foster forgiveness before Lent.”
498
New York Times: “On Wednesday, the Russian Defense Ministry for the first time announced a death toll for Russian servicemen in the conflict. While casualty figures in wartime are notoriously unreliable — and Ukraine has put the total of Russian dead in the thousands — the 498 Moscow acknowledged in the seven days of fighting is the largest in any of its military operations since the war in Chechnya, which marked the beginning of President Vladimir Putin’s tenure in 1999.”
1 million
“More than 1 million people have fled Ukraine following Russia’s invasion, in the swiftest refugee exodus this century, the United Nations said Thursday, as Moscow said it was ready for more talks to end fighting even as its forces pressed their assaults on the country’s second-largest city and two strategic seaports,” the AP reports.
